“Allegiant needs to invest in their people and their pilots.”

So says Tyler Heavey, a captain with Allegiant Airlines for the last six years.

He told me he loves his job. But he doesn’t love the way the company has treated him and his fellow pilots.

“Allegiant was one of the only airlines to actually furlough its pilots” during fall 2020, the height of the COVID pandemic, Heavey said. “They wanted significant concessions [from workers]. And when that didn’t happen, then they chose to furlough over a hundred pilots.”

That included Heavey, who was out of work for months.

“Really flips your life upside down,” he said of that time.

Tyler Heavey, a captain for Allegiant Airlines based in Des Moines, appears in a screenshot from a video call with Iowa Starting Line’s Amie Rivers. (Amie Rivers/Iowa Starting Line)

Heavey is one of around 40 Allegiant pilots based in Des Moines, and one of around 1,400 Allegiant pilots at 22 crew bases across the country, who unionized with Teamsters. They’ve been working without a contract because they’ve been negotiating their last one for the past five years.

It doesn’t help that the union—because labor law is different for airlines—can only negotiate with a federal mediator. That’s been happening just two or three days a month, Heavey said.

“So it’s very hard to make progress,” he said.

That progress, he said, was simple: Give Allegiant pilots what pilots of other airlines get, so that good pilots stop leaving, something Heavey said was happening “every single day” because of money and respect.

“Everything that we’re asking for, and I guess you could say demanding, is what our peers have,” Heavey said. “ It’s industry standard.”

Allegiant has said it has offered an immediate 50% average increase in hourly wages that will rise to 70% over the life of a new 5-year contract.

“It sounds nice, but that still would put us nearly 30% below our peers, and that’s just in hourly rates,” Heavey said. “ We’re already overworked and underpaid, and they want to continue that.”

He said other sticking points for workers include not getting paid for the entire time a pilot was at the airport, and the company’s threat to “basically undo seniority.”

For all those reasons, around 40 captains, first officers, and flight attendants stood for hours in a solidarity picket last month at the Des Moines airport to get attention to their fight, joining a national Allegiant picket.

Still from a video of Des Moines workers striking at the Des Moines airport on Nov. 18, 2025. (KCCI)

A strike was authorized by the union a year ago, with 97% in favor. But Heavey said he hopes it doesn’t come to that.

“We care deeply about this community. But if Allegiant continues to do this, we are gonna continue to lose qualified pilots,” which could mean Des Moines losing routes, affecting travelers, he said.

“We take pride in flying them safely to their destinations,” he added. “ We are a part of the community. We want to have a nice, reliable product for our customers, and we also want to be able to grow. And without a contract, that is not possible.”

Heavey knows Allegiant can afford it, pointing to a failed resort venture that cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It just seems like their priorities are everything except their pilots and their people,” Heavey said. “That’s all we’re asking for.”

Share your thoughts.

All information taken from Iowa Workforce Development’s WARN Act website. Read WARN Act and Iowa WARN Act criteria here.

It’s usually the workers at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder—with the most to lose—that end up fighting the hardest to raise up the working class.

That’s what I took away from labor journalist Kim Kelly’s book, “Fight Like Hell,” a comprehensive look at the various fights that shaped American labor history.

What I quickly learned: Companies have never voluntarily given workers anything other than the bare minimum. And marginalized people have always been at the forefront of the fights for more.

From Black women laundry workers fighting for better pay in the Reconstruction-era South, to Jewish mill workers fighting for better safety standards in the wake of a deadly New York City fire, to queer flight attendants fighting for sexual harassment protection, it’s the workers themselves who are standing up, even if they lose (and they do, a lot).

Kelly’s book also explores the labor fights of those we might ignore, including sex workers fighting against exploitation, and incarcerated workers who are forced to work for pennies on the dollar or else be punished with solitary confinement.

It’s a great, very readable book, filled with inspiring (and heartbreaking) tales that made me wish I had even a little of these folks’ courageousness.

Have you read it? Share your thoughts on it.

You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.

Our mailing address is:
Iowa Starting Line
c/o COURIER Newsroom
101 Avenue of the Americas
8th and 9th Floors
New York, NY 10013

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or from this list.